042 Why Girls Wear Pink & Boys Wear Blue, Dress Historian Jo Paoletti

Curiosityness

Travis DeRose

History, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.8 • 566 Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2019

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's something we rarely think about but why do we dress girls in pink and boys in blue? Is it ok for boys to play with unicorns or for girls to like dinosaurs?

To uncover the answers, dress historian Jo Paoletti looked at advertising, catalogs, dolls, baby books, mommy blogs and discussion forums, and other popular media to examine the surprising shifts in attitudes toward color as a mark of gender in American children's clothing. She chronicles the decline of the white dress for both boys and girls, the introduction of rompers in the early 20th century, the gendering of pink and blue, the resurgence of unisex fashions, and the origins of today's highly gender-specific baby and toddler clothing.

Find Jo on her website at http://www.jbpaoletti.com/

Check out Jo's blog, Gender Mystique, at https://www.pinkisforboys.org/

Grab her book, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2Jq3EmF

And her book, Sex and Unisex: Fashion, Feminism, and the Sexual Revolution on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2TnaiKi

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Find me, the host of Curiosityness on Instagram: @travderose

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the 42nd episode of Curiosityness. I am Travis DeRose. Thank you for being here.
0:09.1	And have you ever wondered why girls seem to always wear and like pink and boys always seem to wear and like blue?
0:17.9	Well, we're going to answer that question for you today because I have on
0:21.6	Joe Pelletti and she's the author of Pink and Blue telling the boys from the girls in America
0:28.0	is the subtitle of that. And, uh, you know, we talk exactly about that. Like, why is that the case?
0:34.4	How did that come to be? And, you know, we talk about how basically all babies
0:40.0	before just used to wear white dresses and just why all this stuff exists and and why,
0:49.0	you know, we talk about like unisex styles and and just it's very, very interesting. Joe was really fun to talk to she's done a lot of study on the stuff um she's done she specializes in history of dress in america um so she has a lot of info and uh data about this stuff so without further ado i'm going to stop rambling. And here is Joe Paioletti,
1:14.7	the author of Pink and Blue, and author of Sex and Unisex. And she has a new book coming out called
1:20.4	Age Appropriate. We talk about all of them. They're very cool. Here's the interview.
1:25.7	And hello, Joe. How are you? I am well. It's a beautiful spring day. How about you?
1:32.4	It is a nice day. I'm doing good. Yeah. Thank you. Where are you located at? We're right outside of
1:37.9	Washington, D.C. So suburban Maryland. Nice. Right on you. I'm in in Long Beach here by L.A. and it's a little chilly for us,
1:47.9	but not bad. Oh, well, we're in the 70s now, which is like... Life's good, huh? Life is good.
1:56.0	Right on. Cool. Well, I mean, this is a... you cover some interesting stuff. Like, things that a lot of people think about, but I mean, it's, you know, very detailed and, and there's a lot to it, I think.
2:12.7	Yeah, yeah. The tagline I usually use, I think, deep thoughts about shallow things because it's something that's everybody's thinking about is kind of out there and they think it's ordinary and it's traditional, it's normal or whatever.
2:25.8	And I'm sitting there saying, ah, it's so complicated.
2:30.5	Yeah, there's just so many things that influence it and everything.
2:33.7	Yeah.
2:35.0	So, yeah, I mean, I guess you, this is from your website.
2:39.3	I'm quoting you here.
2:40.7	It says you're an independent scholar specializing in the history of dress in America.
	...

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